This paper, dated 1936, probably incorporates material from an essay on Lewis that Frye submitted for an honour English course which he took during his second year at Emmanuel College.1 As part of the present essay found its way into “Wyndham Lewis: Anti-Spenglerian,” Canadian Forum, 16 (June 1936), 21–2, it was apparently written during the early months of 1936.2 Frye does not give page references for most of his quotations, but these are provided in the notes and in the citations within the text. It is not always clear which editions of Lewis Frye is citing. For The Apes of God he probably used the 1930 edition published in London by the Arthur Press, a book that is among the annotated copies in Frye’s library, now in the Victoria University Library. The only other book by Lewis in the collection that he could have owned at the time he wrote the paper is The Childermass, section 1 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1928). No mark is recorded on the paper, but Frye earned a first for honour English during his second year at Emmanuel. The typescript is in the NFF, 1991, box 37, file 12.
It is now generally recognized that the cult of sensibility preceding the French Revolution and a similar cult preceding the Russian Revolution were respectively the beginning and end of a fairly homogeneous development, the outlines of which become clearer as we move farther away from it. In its specifically artistic aspect this development produced what is usually called romanticism in its earlier stages, and Impressionism in its later, its most outstanding achievements being, appropriately enough, mainly French and Russian. The chaos of the Great War hastened its collapse and provoked a reaction, which, like most first reactions, contained a small number of genuinely new ideas in embryo, along with the clinging debris of the older ones. We seem to be witnessing the commencement of a new wave of cultural activity, steadily acquiring a shape and force of its own, though at present still largely backwash from its predecessor. In the plastic and graphic arts it has generally been described as “expressionism,” to mark if off from the “Impressionism” it is attempting to replace. Whether it retains and extends this title or not, critics of the future will probably recognize in the two figures of T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis the completion of the first stage of its literary development in England, in an era they will no doubt refer to as the Georgian sunset.
It seems fairly certain, even now, that Wyndham Lewis will live, to whatever extent he is to live, as much by virtue of his critical as his creative work. He is both painter and novelist, but neither his drawings nor his novels have attracted any more interest or discussion than his long treatises, here called diatribes, most important of which are The Art of Being Ruled, The Lion and the Fox, Time and Western Man, Paleface, Hitler, The Diabolical Principle and The Dithyrambic Spectator, and Men without Art. Lewis has never any doubts about his ability as an artist, but his attitude to these books is rather ambiguous. He says in The Diabolical Principle:
Such an essay as Time and Western Man is not supposed to imitate in its form an attic temple. It is a sudden barrage of destructive criticism laid down about a spot where temples, it is hoped, may under its cover be erected.3
If any of these temples are his own, they would presumably be his two novels, Tarr and The Apes of God, his fantasias, The Childermass and The Enemy of the Stars, and the short stories in The Wild Body. In this paper we shall not be concerned with him as an “artist,” but as the critical and apologetic author of the works mentioned, which we regard, for reasons given later, as essentially satires, and as constituting an art form quite as original and significant as any of the others. His drawings do not concern us, and his poetry I have not seen.4
Lewis derives his importance as a thinker from his attitude to the cultural development outlined above. Whatever strength or unity his diatribes possess they owe to the clarity of his perception of it in all its aspects, artistic, political, scientific, and philosophical. Each book lights up a different aspect of his criticism. The Art of Being Ruled gives the most complete presentation of the political side of his attack; Time and Western Man, of the literary and philosophical side: and from these two books the others radiate as more specialized applications of his attitude. The Lion and the Fox and Men without Art concern us chiefly in connection with Lewis’s own view of art and its relation to satire.
The Industrial Revolution, says Lewis, ushered in a form of society far more fluid than anything that had preceded it. Industrial technique entails an incredibly rapid movement in society, of a kind unknown before it; methods of production are no sooner developed than they become old-fashioned, and society accustoms itself to incessant metamorphosis. This engenders in society a certain stereotype of thought, which Lewis calls “revolutionary,” best symbolized by the advertisement. The Art of Being Ruled is devoted to showing that the imminent collapse of this form of society will result in something more stable and permanent, probably an economic world order governed by dictatorships, the ruler of the future being a closer approach to the philosopher-king than the world has yet seen. Hitler treats the Nazi movement in Germany as a symptom of this Caesarean birth; this book, it might be noted, was written in 1931, two years before Hitler came into power. In philosophy, similarly, since the Industrial Revolution society has been evolving a Heraclitean view of life, which identifies reality with motion and change. Most of the artists, philosophers, and politicians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflect this obsession with the ideas of movement and duration. When the doctrine of evolution appears, it is promptly transformed into a religion. God becomes a propelling life-force, and philosophy steadily tends toward a temporal explanation of reality, a process which reaches its logical culmination in Bergson’s creative evolution. But Bergson is not the final step. For this time-obsession is of social origin, and its ultimate goal is political rather than metaphysical. Bergson’s world-view was made concrete and consolidated by Spengler’s philosophy, in which reality becomes, not a life-force, but history itself. The second part of Time and Western Man is devoted to an analysis of the time philosophies of our own day, emphasizing those of Alexander, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, Einstein, Bergson, and Spengler, the last named singled out for a particularly slashing attack. This first part of the same book deals with cultural manifestations of this time-philosophy, as we have them in the work of Proust, Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. Art advances toward the presentation of the movement of time contemporaneously with philosophy: when we have Bergson in philosophy, we have Proust’s long record of life processes in literature; and when philosophy reaches exhaustion and bankruptcy in Spengler, literature reaches a similar point in the “prose-song” of Gertrude Stein and the wandering interior monologue of Work in Progress.5 Closely connected with this absorption in the theme of life-forces are, of course, the ferocious and fortissimo assertions of the will to live, such as we get in Nietzsche and Marinetti. Lewis opened his career, just before the war, with a magazine called Blast, which was devoted to an attack on futurism in its first issue (it produced only one more)6 and was, therefore, largely a blast against Marinetti. The vicious assault on Nietzsche in The Art of Being Ruled is one of Lewis’s best pieces of writing.7 In literature, as a counterpoint to this, we have Hemingway and Faulkner in the novel,8 and, in a more subtle form, the tendency to glorify life as something in itself, to concentrate on the temporal force of activity, to get down to what Lewis calls “the smoking-hot inside of things” [ABR, 403], the preoccupation with the visceral, which characterizes the work of D.H. Lawrence. This time-consciousness develops, of course, a time-snobbery, a cultural parasitism living in the past and nibbling the fruits of tradition, the pedantry of Ezra Pound and the obscurantism of T.S. Eliot being examples. Time snobbery expands into space-snobbery, a cult of the exotic and remote, which meets us in Gauguin and the savage pilgrimage of Lawrence, a primitivist exalting of “dark” or less civilized races at the expense of the whites. To this movement the brilliant Paleface,9 in many respects the best of all Lewis’s books, is devoted.
The political inference from this “revolutionary” consciousness is, of course, the liberal democracy, the forms of which we are vainly endeavouring to preserve. This form of society depends for its stability on the creation of stereotypes of mass thinking, mass entertainment, mass action. It depends, in other words, on a wholesale vulgarizing of the creative activity of art, the speculative activity of philosophy, the exploring activity of science. Industry vulgarizes science; man believes himself to be living in a scientific age because he can play with toys like radios and automobiles, which he could not have acquired without science; and it is only in this “popular mechanics” form that science really reaches him. Politics vulgarizes philosophy: Darwin’s thesis of the survival of the fit becomes the excuse for massed murder. Spengler presses philosophical concepts into a counsel of reactionary fatalism. So the ordinary man gets hold of philosophy only in the forms of social stereotypes. Nietzsche, Sorel, Spengler, and Freud are perhaps the most prominent vulgarizers of philosophical ideas. Lewis is, of course, even more interested in the vulgarizing of art, for a precisely similar process goes on there. Instead of the genuinely creative work of the rare and isolated genius, we find his techniques imitated by shrewd and clever craftsmen, who swarm together in schools, movements, tendencies, groups, and generally in what Lewis calls phalansteries. These cliques, who are naturally on their guard to see that no real genius is given a hearing, vulgarize art into movements which become, like vulgarized science and philosophy, essentially political phenomena. Lewis’s two novels are satires on these herd-artists. Tarr, its scene laid in the cultural underworld of Paris, is built around the antithetical figures of Tarr, the genuine artist, and Kreisler, the typical parasite and charlatan. The Apes of God shifts the scene to London. A Greek with homosexual tendencies, called Zagreus, leads a vacuous moron, Daniel Boylen, through a kind of katabasis in which he is exposed to all sides of this vast interlocking arty “public,” of the “bohemian” variety, of people with private incomes who make hobbies of art, music, literature, and revolutionary politics. Lewis’s world is essentially that of Antic Hay and the biting London scenes of Women in Love.10
The complete individualizing of society resulting from democracy, and the decay of great art, combine to provide the arty charlatan with one of his favourite shibboleths, épater le bourgeois.11 Lewis makes the most of all the antimoral antics indulged in by what he calls the “revolutionary simpleton.”12 There is the cultivation of homosexuality by those who have no special gift for it, but cherish it as something delightfully wicked. There are the quixotic floutings of the taboos placed on sex by those who, in rebelling against convention, have not escaped from it. The usual result of such revolts is merely a further preoccupation with sex. There is the increased probing of abnormal states of mind in search of new thrills, which gives us the cult of the child, the affectation of naivety in Gertrude Stein’s prolonged babble, of the subnormal intelligence in the giants of Picasso and Epstein, of the neurotic in all the Freudian literature, and of the whole development of sadism and diabolism explored by Praz (whom Lewis claims as his disciple) in The Romantic Agony.13 The entire movement, from Rousseau to D.H. Lawrence, is permeated with primitivism: the sentimental admiration, by a sterile and senile society, of the untamed, the unexplored, the uncultivated, the amorphous.14
Such is in very broad outlines Lewis’s attitude to the bourgeois society we are now gradually outgrowing. It will be noted that it is altogether a critical, polemic attitude. I have defined satire as the examination of society from the standpoint of a moralist, and I have used the word moralist as meaning one who works with pragmatic rather than dogmatic standards, who appeals to common sense rather than doctrine or tradition. The mind of the satirist is antithetic; that is, it is in an attitude of antagonism to its subject, and it is on its guard against a thesis of any kind, quick to pounce on it when it becomes an overstatement. The satirist addresses the common-sense jury rather than the expert judge. Now the reason why I describe the diatribes of Lewis as satires is because they take essentially this point of view. He says:
I have said to myself that I will fix my attention upon those things that have most meaning for me. All that seems to me to contradict or threaten those things I will do my best to modify or to defeat, and whatever I see that favours and agrees with those things I will support and do my best to strengthen. In consequence, I shall certainly be guilty of injustice, the heraclitean ‘injustice of the opposites.’ But how can we evade our destiny of being ‘an opposite,’ except by becoming some grey mixture, that is in reality just nothing at all?15
So such books as Time and Western Man, from which this quotation comes, are admitted to be polemics. Lewis could have evaded his destiny of being an opposite by taking any other point of view than the satirist’s. No systematic philosopher and no creative artist unconcerned with the satiric attack would see everything lined up as black, white, and a sneaking cowardly grey. As a satirist, Lewis criticizes effectively enough the existing time-obsession in art and thought, from the standpoint of the common sense that recognizes space as well as time. Where artists, following the dicta of Baudelaire and Pater, try to approach the musical in literature, Lewis points out the integrity and independence of the plastic ideal; where relativity attacks even mathematics, Lewis the satirist is there to protest that two and two absolutely make four. But Lewis’s attack on our Heraclitean stereotypes is not based on any intelligible dogmas of his own. The satirist has no dogmas. The difficulty with Lewis is that he is not perfectly conscious of his own position: he thinks he has a solid dogmatic foundation, with the result that his reaction develops into an ethical dualism, of the sort outlined in Men without Art, which will meet us in a moment. But the fact remains that whenever Lewis is concerned with specific criticism of an artist’s work he is usually brilliant, and whenever he relapses into dogma we are seldom far from a platitude or from some dishonest polemical dodge. He has, it cannot be insisted too strongly, a purely reactive mind, not at all a systematic or structural one. In the criticism of a specific text he becomes witty, pungent, and incisive, his lumbering style (of which more later) springs into life, crystallizes into epigrams, rounds out its rhythmic periods, and coins unforgettable phrases. In the constructive field he is dull, pompous, incoherent, and almost unbelievably inconsistent. Here he is on Gertrude Stein:
It is in a thick, monotonous prose-song that Miss Stein characteristically expresses her fatigue, her energy, and the bitter fatalism of her nature. Her stories are very often long—all the longer, too, because everything has to be repeated half a dozen times over. In the end the most wearisome dirge it is possible to imagine results, as slab after slab of this heavy, insensitive, common prose-song churns and lumbers by. … What is the matter with it is, probably, that it is so dead. Gertrude Stein’s prose-song is a cold, black suet-pudding. We can represent it as a cold suet-roll of fabulously-reptilian length. Cut it at any point, it is the same thing; the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through, and all along. It is weighted, projected, with a sibylline urge. It is mournful and monstrous, composed of dead and inanimate material. It is all fat, without nerve. Or the evident vitality that informs it is vegetable rather than animal. Its life is a low-grade, if tenacious, one; of the sausage, by-the-yard, variety. … The monstrous, desperate, soggy lengths of primitive mass-life, chopped off and presented to us as a never-ending prose-song, are undoubtedly intended as an epic contribution to the present mass-democracy. The texture of the language has to be jumbled, cheap, slangy and thick to suit. It must be written in a slovenly, straight-off fashion, so that it may appear to be more ‘real’. … (she may be described as the reverse of Patience sitting on a monument—she appears, that is, as a Monument sitting upon patience). [TWM, 61, 62]
This is excellent writing, though it gets much of its effect from cumulative repetition of the sort attacked. But here is a constructive suggestion in the field of social reform:
I have somewhat modified my views since I wrote that book (The Art of Being Ruled) as to the best procedure for ensuring the true freedom of which I have just spoken. I now believe, for instance, that people should be compelled to be freer and more ‘individualistic’ than they naturally desire to be, rather than that their native unfreedom and instinct towards slavery should be encouraged and organized. I believe they could with advantage be compelled to remain absolutely alone for several hours every day; and a week’s solitary confinement, under pleasant conditions (say in mountain scenery), every two months, would be an excellent provision.16
It might be noted that the mountaintop cure is pure Nietzsche. Similarly, Paleface, after making some of the most memorable criticisms of Lawrence that are ever likely to be made, winds up at the end by suggesting a matrimonial bureau for marrying Finns to Spaniards and generally systematizing miscegenation, so as to usher in painlessly the racial melting pot of the future [PF, 285–6]. Whether these suggestions are made seriously or not does not affect my point. But the most striking contrast is in Men without Art, where Lewis follows the best hostile criticism of T.S. Eliot yet made with his own creed of art, which is perhaps the most transcendently asinine ever composed.17
Lewis regards art as formalized expression: it is essentially something plastic and static and, therefore, differing in kind from historical phenomena, with which Spengler would class it. Lewis started out as a painter, and for him art means the stationary arts. All through his pronouncements on the subject there runs a hazy paronomasia associating the general term art, which includes music and poetry, with the more restricted use of the word which relates only to painting. Sentences like this keep recurring:
Art is as much a ‘timeless’ thing as technical invention is a creature of time. Its values are more static, as physically it is more static. [TWM, 37]
There are amateur philosophers (I have met a few) who assume, because they know that all philosophy is a search for reality, that any brand of it which calls itself “realism” must be the true philosophy. Lewis similarly assumes that real art is that which explicitly calls itself “art.” He regards Oriental painting as the highest of artistic developments: Western culture, never having been quite static enough, never approached the Asiatic rigidity of outline. He says:
The fact is that the best West European art has never been able to be ‘classic,’ in the sense of achieving a great formal perfection. The nature of our semi-barbaric cultures has precluded that. [TWM, 9]
It was no doubt that same semi-barbaric culture that was responsible for the phrase “best West” in the above quotation. The West’s big moment came in the discovery of science by Renaissance Italy, a period which also saw what Lewis considers the highest development of Western art. The great cultural achievements of Europe are, Lewis thinks, a product of the Latin mind and tradition. In The Lion and the Fox he says, several times:
The flower of european civilization—and the only portion of it that can hold its own for a moment against the productions of the East, or of asiatic or egyptian antiquity—is to be found in the italian renaissance.… It is very noticeable how healthy and physically successful the type represented in italian renaissance art is: probably, excepting the greek and the negro, the most normally balanced physical human type of which we have a record.… It would seem almost, to look at these pictures, as though all the animal health of Europe, too, has flowed up from the latin soil.18
With German development of contrapuntal music he has no sympathy, as he knows nothing about it: his attitude to music changes from the perfunctory lip-service of Time and Western Man to the overt hostility of Men without Art. Nor has he, of course, any sympathy with the prophetic or emotional appeal derived from the Hebraic culture.
There is a negative side to Lewis’s attitude, of course, other than the mere negation of the bad to the good or the false to the true. There are such things as dynamic arts, arts that depend on movement, such as music and poetry, and these arts cannot be described in purely plastic terms; they are rhythmic in their organization. Lewis is aware of their existence, but the gestures he makes in their direction are rather nervous and spasmodic, as in the following quotation:
I prefer … the prose-movement—easy, uncontrolled and large—to the insistent, hypnotic rhythm, favoured by most fashionable political thought in the West. For me, there should be no adventitiously imposed rhythm for life in the rough.… Musical-politics—as the uplift politics of millennial doctrinaires can be termed—are, without any disguise, the politics of hypnotism, enregimentation, the sleep of the dance. [TWM, 26]
This attitude is elaborated through the whole of his preposterous book called The Dithyrambic Spectator, which consists of a number of respectful comments on a book about the rise of plastic art in Egypt, and a number of derisive comments on a book about the rise of dynamic art in Greece.19 It is evident from the quotation given above that to Lewis a rhythm means a march rhythm, just as pattern might, to anyone equally ignorant of the plastic arts, mean merely that pattern of a linoleum rug. Spengler notes a similar reaction on the part of the Chinese to Western music [DW 1:228].
It is obvious, of course, that all moving arts have plastic qualities implicit, and all stationary arts rhythmic ones. In order to ward off this elementary objection, Lewis brings up another antithesis, equally false, but more popular, to buttress the other. This, of course, is the antithesis of intellect and emotion. The side of man busied with conscious formulation is the intellectual side; therefore, the greatest art is intellectual, formalized, plastic, a product of deliberate consciousness. The closer literature gets to this the better; the progressive or temporal approach of Proust and Gertrude Stein is musical and, therefore, emotional. Lewis, in attacking Bergson and Spengler,20 makes the most of the fact that they represent to some extent a reaction against pure intellect. Bergson’s point is, of course, that activity is a homogeneous unit and that both intellect and emotion are critical reactions to activity, not sources of it. Lewis waves all this aside: for him there is only the rational and the nonrational.
Now, what about literature? This “prose-movement—easy, uncontrolled and large” [TWM, 26]: is it not, when read aloud, a succession of sounds in time like music? The other side of Lewis’s one-sided and partial view of art, which becomes so painfully silly when elaborated into a dogma, comes out precisely here, in his own writing. Rhythm is at least as important a quality in prose as a sense of plastic form, however “easy, uncontrolled and large,” and Lewis’s aesthetic attitude seems to be largely a “barrage” designed to cover the fact that he possesses no sense of rhythm.
At the end of Men without Art Lewis quotes the opening pages of The Ivory Tower and Point Counter Point in order to demonstrate the not very soul-shaking fact that the former is a better novel than the latter [MWA, 300–4]. On examination, however, there appears to be nothing very much actually wrong with Huxley’s writing: it is perfectly competent work on its own level of artistic ability. But turn to the opening page of Tarr:
Paris hints of sacrifice. But here we deal with that large dusty facet known to indulgent and congruous kind: it is in its capacity of delicious inn and majestic Baedeker, where western Venuses twang its responsive streets and hush to soft growl before its statues, that it is seen. It is not across its Thébaïde that the unscrupulous heroes chase each other’s shadows: they are largely ignorant of all but their restless personal lives.
Inconceivably generous and naïve faces haunt the Vitelotte Quarter.— We are not, however, in a Hollywood camp of pseudo-cowpunchers (though ‘guns’ tap rhythmically the buttocks). Art is being studied.—But ‘art’ is not anything serious or exclusive: it is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murger’s Vie de Bohème, corduroy trousers, the operatic Italian model: but the poetry, above all, of linseed oil and turpentine.21
One sees here, in the forced, strained vocabulary, the cacophonous sound, the broken-winded stumbling rhythm, the laborious effort at an originality that succeeds only in being bizarre, not competent mediocre writing but merely bad writing. In the more argumentative works the sentences tend to lengthen out to bewildering proportions. “Germanic” or “Teutonic” is a favourite term of abuse with Lewis; he applies it impartially to Frenchmen like Zola and Americans like Gertrude Stein.22 But in this abusive sense it is surely the only possible epithet for such a sentence as the following, selected at random from The Diabolical Principle:
When english was only written in England, it is true, it flourished up into a literature, one bearing comparison with any; but I am not concerned about english especially, so much as pure speech: literatures in any event depend upon circumstances that do not exist now in England or in any country: if a universal tongue is being manufactured in Paris (at the sign of the transplanted Swan of Avon within cat-call of the Odéon or elsewhere) as the literary bagmen or big and little ‘drummers’ of Letters and Art announce—in the most up-and-coming stale journalese of somebody else’s mother tongue that I have ever encountered—why has that volapuk the anglosaxon tongue as a main component at this time of the day?—what a foolish accident, or really serious mistake! [DPDS, 4–5]
There is no doubt that in this megalith Lewis has got the prose movement he prefers—very easy, very uncontrolled, and very large. See how it looks in telegraphic form:
When english was only written in England comma it is true comma it flourished up into a literature comma one bearing comparison with any semicolon but I am not concerned about english especially comma so much as pure speech colon literatures in any event depend upon circumstances that do not exist now in England or in any country colon if a universal tongue is being manufactured in Paris left bracket at the sign of the transplanted italics Swan of Avon roman within cat hyphen call of the Odéon or elsewhere right bracket as the literary bagmen or big and little quote drummers unquote of Letters and Art announce dash in the most up hyphen and hyphen coming stale journalese of somebody else apostrophe s mother tongue that I have ever encountered dash why has that volapuk the anglo hyphen saxon tongue as a main component at this time of the day question mark dash what a foolish accident comma or really serious mistake exclamation mark
And what applies to the construction of Lewis’s alleged sentences extends itself to the construction of his arguments. Taken in groups, the sentences follow one another like elephants in a circus parade, the trunk of each twisted in the tail of the one ahead of it. He drives home his points only through the most infuriating prolixity. He is a good deal of a pointilliste: step by step he gives a curious effect of provocative and stimulating brilliance, but as soon as a general design becomes imperative, the outlines fade away and dissolve. At the end of a book one becomes vaguely aware of having read a large discrete quantity of worthwhile statements, but without any unified sense of what the book is about. This frustrated feeling deepens to exasperation when the book is reread and the same result occurs. I am speaking of readers who finish his books; but his books are unusually difficult to finish. One simply cannot bore the whole way through the deafening unaccented clatter of words. The same defect vitiates the novels, of course: The Apes of God is full of big Rabelaisian ideas that misfire completely, such as the splitman’s litany and the symbolic costume scene,23 because there is no rhythmic organization, as in Rabelais, to carry them through. The scheme of that novel, essentially, as we have said, a kind of katabasis or descent into hell, requires a terrific sweep and swing to bring it off; what we get is the confused rattle of a train going through a tunnel.
One of the most noticeable features of Lewis’s style is his huge vocabulary. In this he is quite within his rights as a satirist: the use of a large vocabulary gives an effect in prose similar to the use of double and triple rhymes in poetry; as he says: “It is in the long run bluff to use our vocabularies except for comic purposes.”24 This preoccupation with words, as well as the barking colloquial style which unites them, has caused Edgell Rickword, in his otherwise admirable essay on Lewis in Scrutinies, volume 2, to associate the style with Nashe.25 But the most remarkable virtue of Nashe’s style is its amazing continuity, and the most outstanding vice of Lewis’s his complete lack of it. Nashe is difficult to lay down, Lewis difficult to get through; Nashe is linear, Lewis punctiliar. What makes the remark even more questionable is the fact that in Time and Western Man Lewis has shown, in a strikingly brilliant passage, the similarity of Nashe’s style to Joyce’s [TWM, 106–9], and has set himself firmly in opposition to both. Beside the broken phrases of Bloom’s monologue in Ulysses Lewis puts those of Jingle in The Pickwick Papers.26 But though opposed to Nashe and Joyce, Lewis suffers from the same excess of verbalism, and in avoiding the jingle he merely falls into the jangle. Parallels to his curiously muscle-bound prose are not easy to find; he is certainly closer to Carlyle than to Nashe, and perhaps closer to Nathaniel Ward27 than to either. As has been said, this criticism applies particularly to those passages in which he is doing what he is not by nature fitted to do, that is, sustaining and developing an argument. In specific criticism, in abuse and invective of all kinds, his writing is admirable. Lewis’s prose, in short, is rather like a brook, if one might use so linear a metaphor: clear, rapid, brilliant, and vigorous on the surface, but merely mud and rocks at any depth.
In his criticism of Galsworthy in Scrutinies, volume 1, D.H. Lawrence remarks that in The Forsyte Saga there are no genuine people, but only Forsytes and anti-Forsytes, the latter, including Irene and Bosinney, being as much parasites on the Forsytes as the Forsytes are parasites on society, equally bound by fetters of class and money, equally snobbish and herd-minded.28 This is a distinction it is possible to apply to a good many situations. The relation of Bosinney to Soames Forsyte29 seems to me exactly the relation of Lewis to Bloomsbury. Just as Bosinney believes himself an individual genius because he is an anti-Forsyte, so Lewis calls himself an “artist” because he is anti-Bloomsbury and exploits as far as possible the fact that the people he attacks are on the whole of minor importance. There are several kinds of charlatans in the world of art, and the swarming, jabbering throng of bohemians and superbohemians, all vigorously criticizing and satirizing each other’s work, are easily identified. More complex are the anticharlatans, people who cultivate some special pose designed to mark themselves off from the others. There is the eremitic anticharlatan, personified in Robinson Jeffers, who renounces society, taking care however not to escape from the critics or the journalists. There is the pedantic anticharlatan of the Pound variety, who makes a front-window display of erudition. There is the portentous anticharlatan of the Thomas Wolfe type, whose method is the straightforward self-distention of the frog in Aesop, confident that someone will eventually mistake him for an ox if he blows long enough and hard enough.30 Compared to these, Lewis is really a very simple type of anti-charlatan. For bohemia, after all, is the only milieu of his novels; he escapes from it far less even than Aldous Huxley does. Lewis has pointed out that the sex rebels of modern society seldom canalize sex, but remain more preoccupied with it than ever.31 In the same way he himself is completely preoccupied with bohemia, and Stephen Spender’s contemptuous epithet of “public-school satire” applied to The Apes of God32 is hardly too strong. Wyndham Lewis is the jester in the court of Bloomsbury. His early vorticist antics are pure bohemian advertisement, and all his attacks on Ezra Pound cannot disguise the parallelism of their careers. They began together, each has defended a right-wing political dictator, and the rather shrewish scolding of the latter half of Men without Art echoes the raucous cackle of the later Cantos.
In calling Lewis’s art form a diatribe we made use of a conception of Spengler’s. To quote from The Decline of the West:
As to the living representatives of these new and purely intellectual creations, the men of the “New Order” upon whom every decline-time founds such hopes, we cannot be in any doubt. They are the fluid megalopolitan Populace, the rootless city-mass … that has replaced the People… . They are the market-place loungers of Alexandria and Rome, the newspaper-readers of our own corresponding time; the “educated” man who then and now makes a cult of intellectual mediocrity and a church of advertisement. … Correspondingly, there is a characteristic form of public effect, the Diatribe. First observed as a Hellenistic phenomenon, it is an efficient form in all Civilizations. Dialectical, practical and plebeian through and through, it replaces the old meaningful and far-ranging Creation of the great man by the unrestrained Agitation of the small and shrewd, ideas by aims, symbols by programs. … It appeals not to the best but to the most, and it values its means according to the number of successes obtained by them. [DW, 1:359–60].
Now this seems, at first sight, to be exactly the kind of document Lewis is most concerned to attack and expose, so that his own controversial works would seem to be antidiatribes, diatribes to end diatribes. But Spengler describes this form as essentially a vehicle of propaganda, and just as the best art conceals art, so the best propaganda conceals propaganda. Let us return to Lewis’s own remark about his works:
Such an essay as Time and Western Man is not supposed to imitate in its form an attic temple. It is a sudden barrage of destructive criticism laid down about a spot where temples, it is hoped, may under its cover be erected. [DPDS, 32]
This sounds like propaganda, at any rate. Let us return to another remark:
But how can we evade our destiny of being ‘an opposite,’ except by becoming some grey mixture, that is in reality just nothing at all? [TWM, 136]
So there can be little doubt that these works are propaganda, and they may, therefore, be examined purely as such.
One of the most frequently used weapons of propaganda is the pun, by which I mean an illegitimate associating of a word and an idea. I have spoken of the amateur philosophers who call themselves realists because philosophy is admittedly a search for reality. Similarly, an agnostic attacking religion will probably make extensive use of the word mystic, not because he knows or cares what it means, but because it sounds something like misty and mystery, and can, therefore, do duty as an abusive epithet, for he knows that his readers will instinctively turn a technical word into a commonplace one whenever they get a chance to do so. This is only a random example: of course every newspaper is full of puns on such words as liberty, democracy, socialism, and so on. The honest writer, not concerned with propaganda, will define and explain his terms as he goes along.
The prose satires of Nashe and Milton, of course, are densely packed with puns, but as most of their work is explicitly invective, this kind of verbalism becomes an easily recognized literary device. But Lewis pretends to something more than invective; he claims to appeal to objective truth, and if he does the same thing, his works count as propaganda, that is, as interested, dishonest writing. Take the following from Time and Western Man:
It (the time-philosophy) is the fruit, of course, of the puritan mind, born in the nineteenth century upon the desolate principles promoted by the too-rapidly mechanized life of the European.33
Now the purpose of what I call the pun is, of course, to arouse unfavourable feelings toward whatever is attacked by associating it with something else generally recognized as undesirable. Most people have a vague animus against Puritanism; so Lewis takes a word belonging to a seventeenth-century religious movement and attaches it to the nineteenth-century philosophy he is getting after. The sentence is so badly constructed that the natural way of reading it is to take “born” as modifying “puritan mind,” thereby suggesting that Puritanism actually arose in the nineteenth century. This is not, of course, the first time that Puritanism and nineteenth-century bourgeois morality have been associated or confused, which makes it all the easier for Lewis to trade on the prejudice. The whole argument of Time and Western Man, however, turns on the word romanticism, the name generally given to the cultural accompaniment of the Industrial Revolution. On page 22 of this book Lewis says:
In analysing ‘romance’ the first definition required, perhaps, is to this effect: the ‘romantic’ is the opposite of the real. Romance is a thing that is in some sense non-existent. For instance, ‘romance’ is the reality of yesterday, or of to-morrow; or it is the reality of somewhere else.
Romance is the great traditional enemy of the Present. And the reason for the contemporary enmity to the mind of Greek Antiquity is because that mind was an ‘ahistorical’ mind—without perspective. (Italics in the original. The reason that ‘ahistorical’ is in inverted commas is that the idea is taken from Spengler—an unusual concession.)34
On page 25 he says:
In the modern ‘classic-romantic’ opposition, Romantic is the warm, popular, picturesque expression, as contrasted with the formal calm of the Classical. … If Racine is your ‘classic,’ and Shakespeare your ‘romantic,’ then ‘romantic,’ in that instance, wins the day. Between Pope and Marlowe the same thing happens, in my opinion. … So in that connection the ‘romantic’ is the real thing, I believe, and not the imitation. [TWM, 9]
All that this means is, of course, that when we call a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl “romantic” and when we call Shakespeare “romantic,” we are using the word in two absolutely different senses, which it is impossible honestly to confuse, or even associate except in a dictionary. What Lewis is ultimately attacking is nineteenth-century romanticism, and “romantic” in this sense means something else again, entirely distinct from the other two. But Lewis wishes to associate this “romanticism” with the abusive sense of the word in connection with the “romancing” of an imaginative child, and in order to quash any feeble protest against this brings together by brute strength the “romantic” idle dreamer and the “romantic” Shakespeare. There is actually an intervening association with the medieval “romance.” Fortunately, Lewis spared us more than a hasty and glossed-over reference to the romance languages.
Of all the critical observations on Wyndham Lewis, two similarly phrased ones call for discussion. Mr. G.W. Stonier, in Gog, Magog, calls him the greatest natural satirist the English have produced since Hogarth,35 and Humbert Wolfe calls him one of the best natural meta-physicians the English have ever produced. We shall have to divide through by “natural,” as we do not know what a natural satirist is, still less what a natural metaphysician is. It seems a curiously ill-assorted pair of remarks about one author. We have shown how the satirist is everything that the metaphysician is not: pragmatic where the metaphysician is dogmatic, concerned with aberration where the metaphysician looks for the typical, concrete where the metaphysician is abstract. Many of the greatest satirists of English literature—Nashe, Swift, both Samuel Butlers—have taken a fling at the metaphysicians. Not that there is any great gulf fixed between them: in my opinion there is an intermediate type, the preacher, the prophet, the orator, the censor, or whatever one wishes to call him, who starts with a certain philosophy and applies it to society, becoming satiric whenever society falls short of his standards. This type is extremely varied: artists so completely different as Blake, Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Bernard Shaw, and D.H. Lawrence belong to it; but of these, perhaps only Blake could be called philosophic in the narrower sense of metaphysical.
The association with Hogarth has this merit, that it does bring out the fact that Lewis’s satire is essentially caricature. The praise of “greatest since Hogarth” is to my mind extravagant: Lewis’s range of studies is exceedingly limited, and he has nothing of the universality of such intervening caricaturists as Rowlandson or Dickens. But take this from Bestre, a story in The Wild Body:
His very large eyeballs, the small saffron ocellatin in their centre, the tiny spot through which light entered the obese wilderness of his body; his bronzed bovine arms, swollen handles for a variety of indolent little ingenuities; his inflated digestive case, lent their combined expressiveness to say these things; with every tart and biting condiment that eye-fluid, flaunting of fatness (the well-filled), the insult of the comic, implications of indecency, could provide. Every variety of bottom-tapping resounded from his dumb bulk. His tongue stuck out, his lips eructated with the incredible indecorum that appears to be the monopoly of liquids, his brown arms were for the moment genitals, snakes in one massive twist beneath his mamillary slabs, gently riding on a pancreatic swell, each hair on his oil-bearing skin contributing its message of porcine affront.36
This is Lewis at his best, and it is masterly caricature, even if does rather stick out as a conscious tour de force against the development of the story. Now of all the types of satire caricature is the most preoccupied with the abnormal. There seems some justification, therefore, for Lewis’s associating himself, in Paleface, with Thomist realism, which holds that universals are real and that individuals are aberrations. One would think, then, that he would have at least some sympathy with Platonic dualism. But no; in Men without Art Plato becomes the granddaddy of all romantics [MWA, 188–90]; his ideas are not in any way norms, but shadows in dreamland, and dreamland, we have seen, is not the true world. But is it the world of artistic creation? Well, yes and no, depending on how Lewis is feeling. On page 19 of Time and Western Man he says:
Romance and reality, these are the two terms we most often employ to contrast what we regard as dream and truth respectively. The ‘romantic’ approach to a thing is the unreal approach. [TWM, 3]
On page 50 he says:
Artistic expression is a dream-condition, and its interpretation must be kept clear of sex-analysis, or else the dreamer passes over immediately into waking life, and so we get no art, and are left with nothing but sex on our hands, and can no longer avail ourselves of the dream-condition. [TWM, 34l
Again, are the subjects of art supposed to be eternally plastic, or are they arrested movement? Blake defended the importance of outline even more vigorously than Lewis,37 but he made it clear that to him form was always the incorporation of energy. But with Lewis the answer to all such tiresome questions seems to depend on his liver or the exigencies of polemic. In The Dithyrambic Spectator he says:
Into the egyptian living death, again, a good deal of the rigor mortis has passed. And that suits art admirably. It asks nothing better than a corpse, and it thrives upon bones. Did not Cezanne bellow at his sitter when he fell off the chair, ‘You’re movingl Les pommes, ça ne bouge pas!’ He preferred apples, in short, not because he otherwise discriminated between men and apples, but because men moved, whereas apples did not. [DPDS, 181]
But we have seen his eagerness to seize on the “deadness” of Gertrude Stein’s writing and Picasso’s painting when he can thereby establish a debating point against them. And in criticizing such thinkers as Spengler or Nietzsche, Lewis comes off best when he criticizes, not their doctrines, but the social effects of their doctrines. This is the typically satiric approach; it is exactly the attitude of Voltaire to Leibnitz, of Swift to Descartes, of Shaw to Herbert Spencer. But to criticize them on their own ground would imply a coherent metaphysical basis of his own, and this Lewis has obviously not got. It is difficult to see how even Humbert Wolfe could have called him a metaphysician.
We are now in a better position to understand that Spengler’s conception of the diatribe applies directly to the polemic works of Lewis. What Lewis claims to be defending, of course, is true art, distinguished from bastard art by its assimilation to politics and its commercialization. With regard to the latter he says:
The same glittering of discreetly hooded eye of the fanatical advertiser, exists in the region of art or social life as elsewhere—only in social life it is their own personalities that people are advertising, while in art it is their own personally manufactured goods only. … And these more blandly-lighted worlds are as full as the Business world, I believe fuller, of those people who seem especially built for such methods, so slickly does the glove fit. [TWM, 23]
He becomes very much annoyed with Diaghilev for making a good thing out of the ballet [TWM, 31–3]—that is enough, apparently, with some sotto voce grumbling about the “epicene” sexual organization of the dancers [TWM, 33], to consign the ballet to bohemia and perdition. Yet I question if anyone understands the commercial methods of selling one’s personally manufactured goods better than Lewis. His habit of perpetually referring to his earlier books and quoting extensively from them is perhaps of small importance. But he uses all the stock commercial tricks. He flatters his readers by telling them that they must be exceptionally gifted or they would not be reading his book. He says in the introduction to The Art of Being Ruled:
Most books have their patients, rather than their readers, no doubt. But some degree of health is postulated in the reader of this book. … A book of this description is not written for an audience already there, prepared to receive it, and whose minds it will fit like a glove. There must be a good deal of stretching of the receptacle, it is to be expected. [ABR, xi, xii]
What women’s clubber could resist an invitation like that? “Have you read Wyndham Lewis?” she will say at the next meeting of her bridge club, in the intervals of munching salted peanuts and wondering whether to bid four spades or five hearts. “You know how D.H. Lawrence says everything is internal and talks so much about sex; well, this man says things should be external and we don’t need to stress sex so much.” If Lewis ever becomes as popular at such gatherings as Lawrence, it will be owing to his shrewd recognition of the fact that the writer who overstates one side of a case is easier to understand than one who tries to be impartial. And he has another trick, of befogging a platitude with portentous phrases signifying that it is a profound truth only very intelligent people like him can discover, and only very intelligent people like his reader appreciate. A remark like this is typical:
So what we generally name ‘the new’ is the very old, or the fairly old. It is as well to point this out, and even to stress it, since it is an impressive fact not sufficiently recognized. [TWM, 36]
His most widely publicized trick is his puffing up of himself, which is, of course, an appeal to society’s passive instinct to take a man at his own valuation. His cocksureness and calm assumption of immense intellect makes the most arrant bluffing of Shaw look like a naked nun. This again he turns on his opponents when it suits his argument to do so:
I refer to the vulgarization of the authentic and lofty ‘detachment’ of the ‘supermen’—of a Shakespeare, a Pascal, or a Machiavelli—and of the penetrating truth of their vision of life (which made matchwood of all human disguises and embellishments) for the use of a swarming ‘intellectualist’ and artistic tribe of subsupermen. This swarming and restless minority, I would argue, has no right whatever to these things. [DPDS, 93]
It has no right to them, apparently, because Lewis wants to play with them. He says, for instance:
Since, then, in one form or another, the eventual success of ‘radical’ ideas seems to me assured, I do not see why, in books such as mine, and those in which I am interested, the ‘transitional’ pretences cannot be dropped. It is of far greater importance to influence a minority in an intelligent direction, quite outside the parrot-cries of ‘Left’ or of ‘Right’ altogether, than for any intelligent person to do the hack-work of ‘revolution,’ which can be performed by one man as well as another. It is a machine-minding job (the mob is here the machine): it is not an intelligent occupation. [DPDS, 147–8]
These quotations are both from The Diabolical Principle. He says in Pale-face:
I have been denounced as a ‘champion’ or ‘saviour,’ and that charge I must deal with once and for all, if only to be able to prosecute my function of ‘impartial observer.’ [PP, 3]
This, of course, is a stock satiric pose: it is the satirist’s business to make himself invulnerable if he can. Milton, in his prose satire, assumed an invincible priggishness and incorruptible virtue, and Lewis makes the same assumptions about his intellect merely for the same reason. But it is precisely because he is not an “impartial spectator” that Lewis’s satire weakens into dogmatism and tries to make a philosophical principle out of his reaction to the time-philosophy.
His place in English literature is obviously as the successor of Bernard Shaw. He is, like Shaw, a “personal appearance artist,”38 perhaps more important as a critic, certainly a far worse writer, and about as much of a humbug and windbag. And no more than Shaw is he a philosopher. It would take too long to examine the frantic muddle of the second part of Time and Western Man, and would be irrelevant in any case. The question, however, does arise: What is the philosophic unity, if there be one, behind Lewis’s work?
It is obviously something not quite clearly revealed to Lewis himself, for he keeps feeling around for all sorts of quasi-dualistic theories to rest on. And of course it is not beyond possibility that his “barrage” conceals it among other things. Now it is a commonplace of psychoanalysis that the thing troubling the neurotic is simply whatever he is most anxious to conceal. And as Lewis always starts to gibber like a chimpanzee whenever he touches on Spengler, that may give us a clue. We have seen that Spengler prophesied the advent of Lewis’s art form. And it is note-worthy that Lewis is not primarily concerned with the objective truth or falseness of Spengler’s theory of the organic growth of cultures. He says:
To say that I disagree with Spengler would be absurd. You cannot agree or disagree with such people as that: you can merely point out a few of the probable reasons for the most eccentric of their spasms, and if you have patience—as I have—classify them. That, I think, I have done enough. [TWM, 297]
This is of considerable significance. How does one find out the reasons for other people’s spasms, and on what principles does one classify them?
Lewis attacks Spengler, not as an individual, but as a symptom of a cultural consciousness. The whole strength of Lewis’s position lies, we have said, precisely in his perception of the unity of that cultural consciousness (or, as Pareto calls it, a “psychic state”).39 The underlying postulate of Lewis’s argument, which he takes so completely for granted that he does not bother to formulate it, is that a given society produces the philosophy, art, literature, politics, and religion appropriate to it. Lewis apparently denies this as general principle. But the whole first part of Time and Western Man assumes the interconnection of the time-philosophies of Bergson and Spengler, the will-to-power attitudes of Sorel, Marinetti, and Nietzsche, the stream of consciousness technique of Proust, Joyce, and Stein, the political development of imperialism and nationalism leading to fascism, and more superficial phenomena like Charlie Chaplin and Anita Loos. He says, of course:
This essay is among other things the assertion of a belief in the finest type of mind, which lifts the creative impulse into an absolute region free of spenglerian ‘history’ or politics. [TWM, 148]
But Lewis has never treated a single great literary figure in this absolute way. In Men without Art Henry James and Flaubert, in The Lion and the Fox the Elizabethan dramatists, are examined from this cultural consciousness point of view. And of course it is precisely the thesis of a cultural consciousness, to which everything contemporaneous in a given society is related, that forms the basic doctrine of Spengler. Lewis might protest that his whole point is that the nineteenth century never produced any really great or “absolute” art; that it was because of the “vulgarization” engendered by democracy that art got mixed up with politics and so became a historical phenomenon. Tackled on the score of The Lion and the Fox, he might extend this principle to our “semi-barbaric cultures.” But every one of Lewis’s diatribes is in some way concerned with that very culture. So what price the following syllogism: All Lewis’s critical books are concerned with the analysis of the cultural consciousness of the Western world, mainly during its last hundred years or so, which is treated as a unity; Spengler’s work is a general view of history based on the same postulate; therefore, all of Lewis’s critical work is a special application of the Spenglerian dialectic. What Epicurus was to Lucretius, what Aquinas was to Dante, what, perhaps, Montaigne was to Shakespeare, that Spengler is to Wyndham Lewis. Lewis’s whole thinking is dominated by Spenglerian concepts. The introduction to The Dithyrambic Spectator is based on Spengler’s theory of craft-art in late civilization. His references to the “roman brutality” of contemporary sport and the “adolescence” of the Elizabethans as compared with our senile child-cult echo Spengler. His denunciations of bohemia are pure Spengler: both novels are Spenglerian satires. His theory of the emergence of the philosopher-ruler, worked out in The Art of Being Ruled, is Spengler’s theory of the rise of Caesarism. His book on Hitler is in octave counterpoint to The Hour of Decision. And so on. In The Lion and the Fox Lewis speaks of Frederick the Great, who, himself the most perfect disciple of Machiavelli in history, composed a bitter philippic against him, which was exactly what Machiavelli would have advised him to do [LF, 98–105]. Similarly, Lewis examines Spengler, in Time and Western Man, as a historical and political phenomenon evolved by the cultural consciousness which also produced Bergson in philosophy, Proust in literature, Einstein in science, Picasso in painting, which is precisely according to Spengler’s own instructions. True, Lewis’s foreshortened perspective and his parenthetic repudiations of the very thesis he is advancing give him an air of being more common sense and practical than Spengler, and of course he makes easy game of Spengler’s bombastic and truculent jingoism, his turgid apocalyptic writing, his irascible retired-colonel Philistinism. But the fact remains, that the more completely Lewis is the Spenglerian satirist, in the same way that Shaw is a Fabian satirist and Auden a Marxian satirist, the better off he is as a writer. Let us go back to the passage in Spengler about the diatribe:
As to the living representatives of these new and purely intellectual creations, the men of the “New Order” upon whom every decline-time founds such hopes, we cannot be in any doubt, etc. [DW, 1:359]
and set beside it this from Paleface:
[We] are now in the position of local tribal chiefs brought within a wider system, which has gathered and closed in around us; and that the law or tradition of our race, which it is our function to interpret, is being superseded by another and more universal norm, and that a new tradition is being born. … I am perhaps the nearest approach to a priest of the new order. [PF, 81]
The Lion and the Fox is a book about Shakespeare, emphasizing the conflict in his plays of the superman and the ordinary man, symbolized by the lion and the fox. The ordinary man is personified in Iago, and, in Time and Western Man, in Charlie Chaplin [LF, 188–9; TWM, 66–8]. Elizabethan drama is aristocratic tragedy composed by bourgeois artists, which means that their attitude to their heroes is one of contempt, tempered by pity when the latter fall to something more like the social level of the dramatist. Elizabethan drama developed a curious villain-type, the Machiavellian, with which dramatists frequently identified their own attitude. Out of all the irrelevant digressions, false starts, and uncompleted points made in this book, the general point of view emerges that the fall of the tragic hero always has a tragic and a satiric aspect. But it is the satiric aspect that is really welded into the concept of the tragedy; the pity the dramatist feels for his hero and makes him communicate to the audience is the result of the fact that only in his misfortune can an overworked and underpaid dramatist have any fellow-feeling for a king. In Shakespeare’s case this is reinforced by a “feminine” mind which made him treat some of his heroes like a lover.40 On the relation of tragedy to satire Lewis says:
It would be found, if great examples of satire were examined one by one, that satire aims its dart only at the fortunate. In the same way tragedy deals only with the fortunate. … Both tragedy and satire aim their blows at the fortunate. They are both occupied with hubris, whose representatives they execute. But whereas satire is essentially ethical, or it is difficult for it not to be, tragedy does not necessarily regard its victim with exultation, however much it shares in the general delight at his fall. [LF, 167, 168]
He claims that, as a corollary of this, it is impossible for satire to attack the unfortunate and be great satire. Shakespeare’s plays are for Lewis essentially satires; he stresses, perhaps overstresses, the importance of the fact that in the more explicitly satiric plays, such as Timon of Athens and Troilus and Cressida, we seem to get closer to Shakespeare’s personal attitude to life than elsewhere. The pathos of the tragic hero’s fall, Lewis claims, is not inherent in the situation: it is merely thrown in to make it sound well:
But we must be aware of several things undreamt of in Timon’s philosophy. We agree more with Apemantus than we do with Timon. We know, for instance, that ninety-nine per cent, of human beings—however high up you may transport them, however much insolence they may deploy when they discover themselves so high up, and however far you drop them down, and however much despair they may feel as they strike the bottom—will never show the least tincture of philosophy. They will never, we know, make even a tenth-rate tragic hero; and will neither produce, automatically, an organ-music like Bach, nor a mournful and gigantic rhetoric like that of Timon. They will say, “Ah, this is too bad! This is cruel! What have I done to be treated in this way? Oh, I am miserable! I wish I were dead and out of it.” A few would be a little more musical, but most would articulate something like that. At the best (and at the worst) they will speak with that terrible cold vibration of self-conscious “emotion” that the typical english actress produces when, as St Joan, or some other distressed heroine, she gets the tragic drop. They will boo, in short, like a cultivated and self-conscious cow … nourished in the matter of emotional expression on the anglican pulpit. [LF, 254–5]
And the reason for this is that the tragic hero appears, under the cold eye of the dramatist, a spoiled, stupid, and fretful child. Lewis has some brilliant passages uncovering the satiric elements in plays like Coriolanus. But there, he contends, the satiric element gets the upper hand; in most cases Shakespeare falls in love with his hero:
In Antony and Cleopatra, for example, it is evident that the author of the play, if in love with anybody, is in love with Antony. And his attitude generally to his “strong men” is one of romantic devotion. [LF, 154]
But in doing this Shakespeare is merely trying to find an excuse to write about something in his best blank-verse style. Shakespeare was essentially an executioner of the tragic hero. His job as a dramatist was brutal and bloody [LF, 145]. And that is in many cases the kind of job a satiric artist has. Look at Hogarth, says Lewis; he had a face like a bulldog. Tarr says:
I am the panurgic-pessimist, drunken with the laughing-gas of the Abyss: I gaze upon squalor and idiocy, and the more I see them the more I like them. Flaubert built up his Bouvard et Pécuchet with maniacal and tireless hands, it took him ten years: that was a long draught of stodgy laughter from the gases that rise from the dung-heap. [TR, 8]
In Men without Art Lewis claims to stand for this aesthetic attitude. He regards the satiric attitude as essential to great art:
This book has, in fact, been written, to put it shortly, to defend Satire. But to ‘Satire’ I have given a meaning so wide as to confound it with ‘Art.’ So this book may be said to be nothing short of a defence of art—as art is understood in the most ‘highbrow’ quarters today. (How I have been able to identify ‘Satire’ and ‘Art’ I argue in Part II.) [MWA, 10]
He is able to do it, of course, by his old punning method of talking about art and calling it satire. He begins by attempting to establish the principle that “the greatest satire is non-moral,” repudiating his remark in The Lion and the Fox that “satire is essentially ethical” [LF, 168]. He says:
There is of course no question that satire of the highest order has been achieved in the name of the ethical will. Most satire, indeed, has got through upon the understanding that the satirist first and foremost was a moralist. And some of the best satirists have been that as well. But not all. [MWA, 107]
He goes on to mention what he considers nonmoral kinds of satire. In Swift, for instance, we find a contemplation of the grotesque which is, says Lewis, “very painful” [MWA, 100]. This very painful contemplation of the grotesque is to Lewis the essence of satire, and he says it is not moral. Then it occurs to him that after all there are some forms of the grotesque which we do not laugh at:
Therefore there is no society that does not refrain from guffawing at the antics, however ‘screamingly funny,’ of its shell-shocked men and war-idiots, and its poison-gas morons, and its mutilated battle-wrecks. [MWA, 112]
So the artist has to select his kind of laughter. That this act of selection is moral through and through is something that only Lewis’s prose style could conceal. And, as Stephen Spender points out in The Destructive Element, what reason, except prejudice, have we for attacking one kind of person rather than another, if no moral standard is implied?41 The delineation of the grotesque appeals to the reader’s sense of the normal. But the satirist is more active than Lewis suggests: the satirist attacks, and if he attacks he must appeal to the reader against the grotesque object, and how that can be done without raising a moral issue I do not see, and Lewis does not explain. However, at the end of all this, Lewis throws up the sponge completely and comes with an enthusiastic bounce back into the moralistic fold:
But to return again to Satire: Satire is cold, and that is good! It is easier to achieve those polished and resistant surfaces of a great externalist art in Satire.. .. There is a stiffening of Satire in everything good, of ‘the grotesque,’ which is the same thing.… This cannot be gainsaid. Satire is goodl [MWA, 121]
True, it does occur to him later that “good” implies a moral standard, so he says that his idea of “good” is something very profound indeed, and that the nearest vernacular approach to it is “real.” He proceeds to write a chapter then on “Is Satire Real?” and has very little difficulty proving that it is. But it is perhaps time to wade through another bog of argument closely connected with this one.
Satire, morally regenerate or otherwise, belongs to a certain approach toward art, Lewis maintains. There are two antithetical ways of creating art. One is from the inside: it tries to evoke the inmost consciousness, it is subjective, romantic, lyrical, musical, depending on the ear, favoured by Henry James, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Marcel Proust. This way is bad. The other is from the outside: it depicts people as they appear to the eye; it is purely an ocular art, classical, graphic, objective. This way is good. It is the method of The Apes of God:
For The Apes of God it could, I think quite safely, be claimed that no book has ever been written that has paid more attention to the outside of people. In it their shells or pelts, or the language of their bodily movements, come first, not last. [MWA, 118]
We have already dealt at some length with Lewis’s conception of “romantic” and have shown that in order to attack romanticism more effectively he tied it up with entirely different ideas of “romance.” The result of this was to attempt to dismiss romanticism as a specifically historical phenomenon and gradually develop a conception of literature presenting a mighty Manichean opposition of classic and romantic running all through it. As nearly as one can make out, they are overemphases on intellect and emotion respectively. One is “light” and the other “dark,” in the best Manichean tradition. Anybody can see that the inside of an oyster is darker than the outside; that is apparently Lewis’s excuse for associating the antithesis of light and darkness with the antithesis of inside and outside. This antithetical scheme, as in most dualistic systems, tends to absorb every other kind of opposite. The light outside is “masculine,” the dark inside “feminine”; one is concrete, the other vaporous. He says:
To put this matter in a nutshell, it is the shell of the animal that the plastically-minded artist will prefer. The ossature is my favourite part of a living animal organism, not its intestines. My objections to Mr. D.H. Lawrence were chiefly concerned with that regrettable habit of his incessantly to refer to the intestinal billowing of ‘dark’ subterranean passion. In his devotion to that romantic abdominal Within he abandoned the sunlit pagan surface of the earth. [MWA, 120–1]
Directly following this comes the passage already quoted, that “satire is good.” The Manichean scheme is complete; the “plastically-minded artist” becomes the good artist. We have Ormuz-Lewis, protagonist of sweetness and light, and Ahriman-Lawrence, demon of the horror of great darkness. The objections to the preposterous passage about the shells are too automatic to be worth dwelling on. Human beings have no shells: their “ossatures” are inside, all tangled up with their intestines: if a man did have a shell, he would have to come out of it in order to make a fool of himself and so become a subject for satire: no art can be abstract enough to deal with only the external side of life: a man becomes a subject for the artist when he starts to move, and not before: caricature gets its effects wholly by suggesting past movements. And so on. Lewis flounders on, actually making a creed out of his position. He says:
For an understanding of the literature of today and of tomorrow it is very necessary, I believe, to grasp the principles involved in his question; namely, that of the respective merits of the method of internal and external approach—that statement of mine, made just now, I will return to before concluding the present chapter.
My reasons for believing that the method of external approach is the method which, more and more, will be adopted in the art of writing are as follows: [MWA, 126]
He goes on to make a series of points, which we shall in concluding this essay examine one by one. Our comments are to be regarded as notes for a projected Ph.D. thesis, to be entitled: Wyndham Lewis’s Theory of Satire and its Relation to Zoroaster and St. Athanasius.
(1) The external approach to things belongs to the ‘classical’ manner of apprehending; whereas the romantic outlook (though it may serve the turn of the ‘transitionists’) will not, I believe, attract the best intelligences in the coming years, and will not survive the period of ‘transition.’42
Here, of course, are the hosts lined up for Armageddon. This first point of Lewis’s creed is his battle-cry, his triumphant affirmation that the right will triumph, and that the forces of evil and darkness shall be vanquished, shall flee away and be utterly dismayed. It is perhaps true that “transition” is a rather colourless word for this apocalypse, but dry and clipped speech, when one is choking with emotion, is no doubt part of the “classical” technique. Two other points come to one’s mind. The first is that throughout this book Lewis mentions Mario Praz’s Romantic Agony, a book he says was written under the influence of his own Diabolical Principle, and uses it effectively enough as a sourcebook of the Bible of hell composed by the sadists and diabolists of the last century.43 But Praz explicitly states that he regards romanticism as a definitely historical phenomenon centring in the nineteenth century, at which time, he says, arose a new aesthetic concept of the beauty of pain, and as nothing more than that.44 He gives no support to Lewis’s Manichean theory of literature. The second point is that the phrase “the romantic outlook … will not… attract the best intelligences in the coming years” is composed in exactly the idiom of the “revolutionary simpleton” attacked in Time and Western Man, the novelty-hunter obsessed with the idea of “keeping up with the times” or with time.
(2) The external approach to things (relying upon evidence of the eye rather than of the more emotional organs of sense) can make of ‘the grotesque’ a healthy and attractive companion. Other approaches cannot do this. The scarab can be accommodated—even a crocodile’s tears can be relieved of some of their repulsiveness. For the requirements of the new world-order this is essential. And as for pure satire—there the eye is supreme. [MWA, 127]
If Lewis would wallow in emotionalism long enough to listen to himself talk, he might avoid at least a few of these howlers. What is an emotional organ of sense? What has emotion got to do with sense experience? A is for art, B is for brains, and C for the canon of aesthetics that says that the different arts are different forms of imaginative organization and that the particular sense they appeal to is incidental. When Lewis claims that The Apes of God appeals to the eye he obviously means the mind’s eye, if he means anything; if somebody is reading the book aloud to me, which heaven forbid, I am taking in a series of sound impressions, just as I am when I am listening to Mozart. It does not matter that Mozart sounds like Mozart and Lewis’s prose like an army tank falling into the Grand Canyon. If Lewis means in the above paragraph that Goya, say, merely because he was a painter, could put across the grotesque in a way that Beethoven, merely because he was a musician, could not, or that the village studies of Breughel are capable of revealing the grotesque in a way that the Peasant’s Cantata45 is not, the ignorance and Philistinism such a proposition implies puts it beyond discussion. If Lewis means that the grotesquerie of Falstaff is mainly due to his fat body and not to the way he talks, he is again out of my depth. One continually thinks, however, of a phrase in an essay of T.S. Eliot: “If Mr. Lewis means (I am not sure what he means)—.”46 The only other thing to notice in the above paragraph is the remark: “For the requirements of the new world-order this is essential,” which is exactly the kind of statement that makes a target out of Spengler in Time and Western Man.
(3) All our instinctive aesthetic reactions are, in the west of Europe, based upon Greek naturalist canons. Of the internal method of approach in literature, Joyce or James are highly representative. Their art (consisting in ‘telling from the inside,’ as it is described) has for its backgrounds the naturalism (the flowing lines, the absence of linear organization, and also the inveterate humanism) of the Hellenic pictorial culture. Stein is Teutonic music, jazzed—Stein is just the German musical soul leering at itself in a mirror, and sticking out at itself a stuttering welt of a swollen tongue, although perhaps, as she is not a pure Teuton, this is not quite fair to the Teuton either—it is the mirror that is at fault. [MWA, 127]
Until I can be sure whether Lewis is trying to say that Hellenic pictorial culture and Teutonic music are part of the same tradition or not, and, if so, what music can conceivably have to do with naturalism or inveterate humanism, I can hardly consider myself capable of dealing with this broadside. I do know that I cannot argue with anyone who regards, or pretends to regard, the development of contrapuntal music in the West as a mistake. The remark about Gertrude Stein shows a curious insensibility. If Stein is anything, she is demotic—the absolute lack of complication in her style, the hypnotic effect of her repetitions, produce a startlingly vivid effect of colloquial vigour, when properly handled (as it is sometimes, more often perhaps by her imitators than by her). I should think that her position in English literature, along with the school which is exploiting her ideas and techniques, would eventually be somewhat similar to the position of the New Testament in Greek literature. Certainly the New Testament produces the only examples I have been able to find of anything like Gertrude Stein. Here, for example, is Stein:
A composition of a prolonged present is a natural composition in the world as it has been these thirty years it was more and more a prolonged present. I created then a prolonged present naturally I knew nothing of a continuous present but it came naturally to me to make one, it was simple it was clear to me and nobody knew why it was done like that, I did not myself although naturally to me it was natural, [qtd. in TWM, 59].
And here is the First Epistle of John:
That which was from the beginning, that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the Word of life (and the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you the life, the eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us); that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you also. [1 John 1:1–3]
But this kind of effect is not usually the one we have in mind when we use the word Teutonic abusively. We think of a confused, heavy, dull, pompous, incoherent style, lumbering along in polysyllables, trying to express abstract ideas and not succeeding. In other words, we think of a style very similar to that of Lewis. Lewis’s real predecessors in English prose were the nineteenth-century Teutons, Carlyle and Meredith. Had Lewis modelled his prose on them, and learned from them where to place his accents, he would have been better off as a stylist. But he never did learn anything about accents, and so remains, vaguely Teutonic, but jazzed—jazzed until both the fundamental rhythmic beat and the superimposed rhythm of syncopation disappear in a clatter.
(4) If you consider the naturalism of the Greek plastic as a phenomenon of decadence (contrasted with the masculine formalism of the Egyptian or the Chinese) then you will regard likewise the method of the ‘internal monologue’ (or the romantic snapshotting of the wandering stream of the Unconscious) as a phenomenon of decadence. [MWA, 127]
Here, apparently, the assimilation of Hellenic pictorial and Teutonic musical cultures has advanced a step. All I can dimly sense in this paragraph is the emergence of yet another kind of intellectual snobbery. By intellectual snobbery I mean the exaltation of a certain attitude or cultural tradition at the expense of all the rest in estimating works of art, such as we find in moralizing criticism, in jingoist criticism, in the narrower Marxist approach, in the Anglo-Catholic formulas of the post-Andrewes Eliot.47 No sooner have we got accustomed to the “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion” shibboleth than we get someone else, also claiming to be classical, talking about the “masculine formalism” of one culture and the “decadence” of another. I suspect that, because the Chinese are fallible human beings, there might be a good deal of slimy (romantic) chop suey about their less successful efforts which it would be fatal to overpraise. I know nothing about that, however. I know only that the strength of Oriental art is the result of an immensely long tradition and convention, and that Lewis shares the “romantic” idea of the artist or genius as arbiter of both form and content of his work and as a lonely isolated anarchic individualist who prefers the “prose-movement—easy, uncontrolled and large” to any form of “enregimentation.”
(5) A tumultuous stream of evocative, spell-bearing, vocables, launched at your head—or poured into your Unconscious—is, finally, a dope only. It may be an auriferous mud, but it must remain mud—not a clear but a murky picture. As a literary medium it is barbaric. [MWA, 127]
This is rather better. But he is still not thinking clearly. He is talking as though the meaning of art were a meaning which denotes, like the meaning of science. Art is synthetic, and connotes; that is its big distinction from science or philosophy. Art is bound to work with symbols which unite varied aspects of experience and bring them into ordered groupings. There is a certain misty residue about all art, owing to the fact that art means different things to different people. When a man is contemplating a picture, for instance, he tries to isolate his own reaction, because the reactions of all possible types of people beside himself form a nimbus around his appreciation. If I am looking at Mona Lisa, I can no more get away from the gum-chewing tourist beside me than I can get away from Walter Pater, except by responding to a meaning in the picture essentially “evocative” and “spell-bearing.” One might also quote a stray passage or two from Lewis’s own work: here are a couple of sentences from The Childermass:
Is not your Space-Time for all practical purposes only the formula recently popularized to accommodate the empirical sensational chaos? Did not the human genius redeem us for a moment from that, building a world of human-divinity above that flux? Are not your kind betraying us again in the name of exact research to the savage and mechanical nature we had overcome; at the bidding, perhaps, of your maniacal and jealous God?48
This sounds to me rather like a tumultuous stream of vocables launched at my head—there is a lot more of it—perhaps I am being captious.
(6) If Henry James or if James Joyce were to paint pictures, it would be, you feel, a very literary sort of picture that would result. But also, in their details, these pictures would be lineal descendants of the Hellenic naturalism. Only, such details, all jumbled up and piled one against the other, would appear, at first sight, different, and for the Western Hellenic culture, exotic.—Nevertheless, as in the pictures of most Germans, all the plastic units would be suffused with a romantic coloration. They would be overcharged with a literary symbolism; their psyche would have got the better of their Gestalt—the result a sentiment, rather than an expressive form. [MWA, 127–8]
I do not see what an “expressive form” could express except its own inside. But what is one to do with a writer who happens to be a painter as well, and then bullies all the other writers because they can’t paint, having spent more time learning to write; complains that if literary people were to paint, their paintings would be literary; and then proceeds to construct out of the air an elaborate description of the paintings they would paint if they could paint, and builds an argument on that?
(7) We know what sort of picture D.H. Lawrence would paint if he took to the brush instead of the pen. For he did so, luckily, and even held exhibitions. As one might have expected, it turned out to be incompetent Gauguin! A bit more practice, and Lawrence would have been indistinguishable from that Pacific-Parisian Pierre Loti of Paint. [MWA, 128]
Still, if one rejects all Western culture as semi-barbaric, and all Hellenic culture as decadent, as Lewis does in proposition 4, and turns to the Orient as the true home of great art or to the masculinely formal tradition of Egypt, one gets again a kind of romantic exoticism. For the man who made this estimate of European as compared with Oriental and Egyptian art before Lewis made it was, of course, Gauguin. Set beside the fourth paragraph already quoted the following from one of Gauguin’s letters:
Keep the Persians, the Cambodgiens and a bit of the Egyptians always in mind. The great error is the Greek, however beautiful it may be.49
(8) To turn more to the renowned critic with whom we started, Hazlitt. In reading Shakespeare, he said “we are let into the minds of his characters, we see the play of their thoughts. … His humour (so to speak) bubbles, sparkles, and finds its way in all directions, like a natural spring.”—And that natural-spring effect is the Greek naturalism, of course, as I have already indicated. That naturalism (whatever else may or may not happen) is bound to be superseded by something more akin to the classic of, say, the Chinese.
Shakespeare is the summit of the romantic, naturalist, European tradition. And there is a great deal more of that Rousseauish, natural-springishness, in much recent work in literature than is generally recognized. But especially, in the nature of things, is this the case with the tellers-from-the-inside—with the masters of the ‘interior monologue,’ with those Columbuses who have set sail towards the El Dorados of the Unconscious, or of the Great Within.50
So Lewis is going to head for the goal of the conscious, or the Great Wall. Columbus also thought he was going to China, incidentally. “Is bound to be superseded by the Chinese”; “whatever else may or may not happen.” “Oh, those mysterious musts of Spengler’s!” says Lewis in Time and Western Man [287].
(9) Dogmatically, then, I am for the Great Without, for the method of external approach—for the wisdom of the eye, rather than that of the ear. [MWA, 128]
What he is really for is a clanking, clattering, rhythmless, and deadened civilization, which has gazed on myriads of meaningless, trivial, concrete visions until it has developed more blind eyes than a peacock. But its main trouble is still its tone-deafness. An entertaining cinema has recently showed us that if we went back to the eighteenth century the first thing we would be conscious of would be the bad smell;51 and not until we realize that the hideous noises surrounding us are equally obscene shall we make any genuine advance in culture. Art is energy incorporated in form: the energy rhythm, the form plasticity. Overemphasis of the one leads to a surging Heraclitean chaos, overemphasis of the other to a frozen Parmenidean one. Both these, however, are really the same thing: the source of all evil in art is this unfortunate tendency toward the abstract antithesis, toward the composing of cheap epigrams which minor critics revel in and serious artists avoid. There is no use saying, as some good-natured weakling might say: But, after all, if Joyce is for the ear and Lewis for the eye, Lawrence for the internal and Lewis for the external, Proust for the musical and Lewis for the graphic, Spengler for time and Lewis for space; well, there is a lot to be said on both sides, so why not combine them and get at the truth? Our point is, however, that Lewis’s criticism would be effective if it were confined to satire, but frozen into a dogma of antithesis it is worthless. One cannot combine the convex and concave to get a new perspective. If one combines two qualitatively different substances, like hydrogen and oxygen, one gets a genuine compound: in place of two gases that will burn we get a liquid that won’t. But if we mix oxygen with carbon dioxide, which is merely a reaction against oxygen, all we get is hot air. There is no wisdom of eye plus ear or eye multiplied by the ear, any more than there can be the wisdom of eye minus ear which Lewis recommends, or the wisdom of ear minus eye which he attacks. There is wisdom only of the conscious mind, which, though versatile, is in one piece.